Re-enactors to occupy historic site

A historic Thibodaux site will become a living history diorama this weekend, as Civil War re-enactors set up their annual camp at the E.D. White home on La. 1.

Johnny Authement, a Bayou Blue welding shop owner and commander of the Randall Lee Gibson Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, will join Thibodaux attorney and Civil War historian Denis Gaubert along with others for the weekend.

They will sleep in tents on the property, offer displays of period weaponry and demonstrate camp cooking as well as the firing of a cannon.

The re-enactors will set up Friday night and the public is invited from 8 a.m. Saturday through 2 p.m. Sunday.

“It’s an opportunity to meet a lot of really good people and to explore our heritage,” Authement said.

The group gathering at the site traditionally re-enacts the activities of Bouanchaud’s Battery, a component of the Pointe Coupee Artillery.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans is an organization of people who can directly trace their lineage to a specific soldier who served in the Confederate forces. The Gibson camp, headquartered in Thibodaux, is the closest local division of the organization.

Anyone who believes they may have a Confederate ancestor is particularly invited to attend the free event.

The weekend program is an annual presentation of the Louisiana State Museum.

The E.D. White site at 2295 La. 1 was the home of Edward Douglas White, governor of Louisiana from 1835 to 1839, and his son, Edward Douglass White, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1894 and served as chief justice from 1910 to 1921.

Historians date the construction of the plantation home anywhere from the late eighteenth century to the 1830’s, and was originally of a Creole cottage design.

In the 1840s it was transformed into a Greek Revival house, in keeping with the style of the times.

Encampment participants will be wearing authentic uniforms.